Government officials are pushing back against a TV report that said thousands of people vaccinated at the Oakland Coliseum this week were receiving doses that were smaller than they should have been.
Referring to two unnamed emergency medical technicians, KTVU reported on Wednesday that approximately 4,300 people who were vaccinated at the Oakland Coliseum before 2pm on Monday had received “the wrong vaccine doses” from the Pfizer vaccine because the syringes were rather vaccinated at the bottom of the container. left it. of everything.
Government officials who run the clinic told The Chronicle that they have recently started using a new type of syringe. But they vehemently denied that anyone at the Colosseum had received too little vaccination.
“We are not aware of any case where even a single person at the Oakland Coliseum site has been vaccinated below,” said Brian Ferguson, a spokesman for the California Office of Emergency Services, which operates the Coliseum site with the Federal Emergency. Management Agency, said.
State officials did not warn vaccine recipients of any problem, according to them, because there is no problem.
According to KTVU, the EMTs said the syringes were “designed in such a way that the plunger could not reach to the bottom”, allowing the syringes to be less than the full dose of vaccine.
The Food and Drug Administration recommends that the Pfizer vaccine be administered in two doses of 0.3 milliliters each.
But a study by the New England Journal of Medicine says that people who receive 0.2 ml of the vaccine will have just as much immunity to the virus as those who receive 0.3 ml, Dr. George Rutherford, an epidemiologist at UCSF, said.
Other infectious disease experts who have reached The Chronicle did not want to say whether they think a smaller dose would be just as effective as the full amount. Everyone said the vaccine manufacturer would have to answer such a question.
Pfizer declined to comment.
The Colosseum opened on February 16 as one of the first mass vaccination centers in California. Federal and state officials said the goal is to administer up to 6,000 doses of the vaccine per day on site, but the issues in the Coliseum and other vaccination sites were a problem.
Vaccination for the Colosseum comes from the federal government and not from the total grant from the state.
Michael Williams, Meghan Bobrowsky and Catherine Ho are writers of San Francisco Chronicle staff. Email: [email protected], [email protected], [email protected]